Everybody gets to design Ubuntu phones—see the best “fan-made” mockups

Canonical asked community members to submit designs, and they did en masse.

How would you like to create a smartphone operating system? If you get involved in Canonical's Ubuntu phone project you can, in a way. As we reported, Canonical is taking community input on what the core applications (e-mail, calendar, clock/alarm, weather, file manager, document viewer, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter) should look like.

While an early version of the operating system is supposed to be released as open source code in late February, we haven't been able to go hands-on with Ubuntu for phones just yet. Still, it's fun to take a look at the application designs developers have come up with for core Ubuntu phone apps. So we're going to show you a sampling of them in this gallery.

If you see any designs you hate, don't worry. These mockups are suggestions from Ubuntu community members rather than designs made by Canonical's phone team. This is part of the building process: the best aspects of community proposals will hopefully make it into Ubuntu phones when they finally hit the market sometime toward the end of 2013 or beginning of 2014.

David Planella of Canonical told us the goal is to "enable interested community members to participate in the design process of the core phone apps by providing their input," and "support the core app developer teams with a source of inspiration and reference for the implementation."

The project is still in the very early stages. "The Design team at Canonical is currently working on a set of application design guidelines which will land very soon," Planella said. "But until then, the core app developers can get started on the implementation by using some of the design ideas submitted by the community." There's no telling what will end up in the final version of the apps, but Planella said community-contributed mockups "will all provide very valuable input to developers."

If you want to contribute some of your own designs, check out the project guidelines here. There's also a site for developers to help them build third-party apps for Ubuntu phones. In the meantime, take a look at the images to see some of the best designs so far for the phone platform's core apps.

A fairly standard YouTube app design, which lets you hide the controls and just watch the video by swiping up or down.

Andrew Cunningham

Finishing up with something prettier, we saw Ubuntu running on a Galaxy Nexus at the Consumer Electronics Show. As soon as the Ubuntu phone code becomes publicly available, we plan to test it out ourselves.